The Making of The Narrow Edge

A small sandpiper—the red knot—is the first U. S. bird listed under the Endangered Species Act whose future is imperiled by global warming.  If the law isn’t eviscerated, it won’t be the last.  Each year, the birds fly between Tierra del Fuego and the Arctic and back, taking the measure of a shoreline running the length of two continents.  It is a shoreline of the Anthropocene, increasingly reshaped by development, overfishing, beach erosion and storm surges.  Along their route, the birds refuel on the pin-sized eggs of horseshoe crabs, whose numbers have plummeted, but whose blue blood safeguards human health.  Deborah Cramer accompanied the birds along their extraordinary migration to bring back a firsthand account in her award-winning book The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, An Ancient Crab, and An Epic Journey. Join her to explore the kinds of choices she made as, writing the book, she sought to bridge the gap between how scientists and the public understand the world. Co-sponsored by the Environmental Studies program, the Biology Department, and the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research

Deborah Cramer is also offering individual consultations with faculty that you can sign up for here.

 Presenter Bio

Deborah Cramer, a visiting scholar at MIT’s Earth Systems Initiative,  lives at the edge of salt marsh in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  She’s written two natural histories of the sea, Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage, and Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water Our  World, the companion to the Ocean Hall at the U.S. National Museum of Natural History.  Her most recent book, The Narrow Edge, received the Best Book Award from the National Academies of Science and the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. You may have read her op-eds in the New York Times, or heard her on NPR.